Tuesday, February 14, 2012

· Through Waves' Recording Log - Part IV ·

I’ve always had some sort of trouble in recording vocals. For me, it is absolutely the worse, hardest part of producing a record. Not only because I don’t have a great voice or any kind of singing know-how, but mainly because I don’t always have the perfect environment (acoustically speaking) and proper gear to put my voice in the work; and weirdly, I get so used to the instrumental tracks that when I throw in the singing bits, it all seems off. I get really frustrated, especially if that particular session was minimally successful (as in “thorough warm-ups preparation, flawless singing and rightly channeled energies”). I am no longer ashamed of my voice, but I’m not exactly prone to call myself a “singer” either.

In the past months I’ve been having a hard time recording the vocals for this one particular song. It’s a classic case of patience-test for me: I have the perfect instrumental, the singing-lines are set up accordingly and I’m in a good mood to start recording. And yet, I had to redone that track three times before I came up with something ok-ish…- But not entirely satisfactory. I still cringe a bit when listening to this, and I am positively sure I’ll have to revisit it by the end of February to get it right. I hope this song show me how it wants to be crafted, and what it wants to become. I am my worse critic when it comes to this, and admittedly, I am a perfectionist. But when things are off-balance, my gut never fails to point it out.

Wish me luck for the next recording sessions, as I am nearly about to pull out an ancient secret of recording wizardry: the bathroom-singing. More on that soon.